Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Self-Service Knowledge for Everyone

Having the right piece of knowledge at the right time is pure gold in business. I rarely speak with a commercial Jaspersoft customer without hearing a fascinating anecdote about how they are using our BI tools to make new insight emerge quickly and affordably within their organization. Of course, this is what we are in business to provide.

The Jaspersoft Community is no different. Consequently, our open source customers need information and insight to get the most out of their experience with our projects and products. For nearly two years, we’ve talked internally about how to deliver more comprehensive knowledge to this community that is more consistent with the knowledge we’re able to deliver to commercial customers, but in a scalable, virtual manner. With the launch and availability of Self-Service Express, we’re now able to begin delivering on this goal.

This spring, we surveyed our community to learn more about its appetite for more formal, professional knowledge about Jaspersoft community products. The responses were consistent with our intuition. More than 80% of respondents declared interest in having access to better technical knowledge, even for a modest fee.

Our Community Advisory Board affirmed this interest, with member Ben Uphoff stating: “Self-Service express will help me and my team become more productive as we build reports and dashboards for our users. The enterprise search capability means we can quickly find what we are looking for and the rich documentation and customer knowledge base provide us with a lot of useful and practical how-to information.”

Self-Service Express is a clever combination of our new enterprise search engine, our fast-growing Knowledge Base, and newly-created access to all of our professional technical documentation (commonly known as “Ultimate Guides” but in a searchable PDF format). The result is this powerful yet inexpensive knowledge service that allows any Jaspersoft customer, community or commercial, to gain fast, accurate technical answers that can help drive more successful BI projects.

This is the first of a series of knowledge services that we’ve envisioned, and we look forward to more community feedback to determine which direction we go from here. Let us know what you think about Self-Service Express. In the meantime, we’ll continue to advance the knowledge components of this first service, driving greater value through insight to all those who use it.